Review on 'Why I am not a Muslims'

In March 1989, shortly after Ayatollah Khomeini issued his decree
sentencing Salman Rushdie to death for his novel The Satanic Verses,
London's Observer newspaper published an anonymous letter from
Pakistan. In it, the writer, a Muslim who did not give his name,
stated that "Salman Rushdie speaks for me." He then explained:

mine is a voice that has not yet found expression in newspaper
columns. It is the voice of those who are born Muslims but wish to
recant in adulthood, yet are not permitted to on pain of death.
Someone who does not live in an Islamic society cannot imagine the
sanctions, both self-imposed and external, that militate against
expressing religious disbelief. "I don't believe in God" is an
impossible public utterance even among family and friends. . . . So
we hold our tongues, those of us who doubt.
"Ibn Warraq" has decided no longer to hold his tongue. Identified
only as a man who grew up in a country now called an Islamic
republic, presently living and teaching in Ohio, the Khomeini decree
so outraged him that he wrote a book that transcends The Satanic
Verses in terms of sacrilege. Where Rushdie offered elusive critique
in an airy tale of magical realism, Ibn Warraq brings a scholarly
sledge-hammer to the task of demolishing Islam. Writing a polemic
against Islam, especially for an author of Muslim birth, is an act
so incendiary that the author must write under a pseudonym; not to
do so would be an act of suicide.

And what does Ibn Warraq have to show for this act of unheard-of
defiance? A well-researched and quite brilliant, if somewhat
disorganized, indictment of one of the world's great religions.
While the author disclaims any pretence to originality, he has read
widely enough to write an essay that offers a startlingly novel
rendering of the faith he left.

To begin with, Ibn Warraq draws on current Western scholarship to
make the astonishing claim that Muhammad never existed, or if he
did, he had nothing to do with the Qur'an. Rather, that holy book
was fabricated a century or two later in Palestine, then "projected
back onto an invented Arabian point of origin." If the Qur'an is a
fraud, it's not surprising to learn that the author finds little
authentic in other parts of the Islamic tradition. For example, he
dispatches "The whole of Islamic law" as "a fantastic creation
founded on forgeries and pious fictions." The whole of Islam, in
short, he portrays as a concoction of lies.

Having thus dispensed with religion, Ibn Warraq takes up history and
culture. Turning political correctness exactly on its head, he
condemns the early Islamic conquests and condones European
colonialism. "Bowing toward Arabia five times a day," he writes,
referring to the Islamic prayer toward Mecca, "must surely be the
ultimate symbol of . . . cultural imperialism" In contrast, European
rule, "with all its shortcomings, ultimately benefited the ruled as
much as the rulers. Despite certain infamous incidents, the European
powers conducted themselves, on the whole, very humanely."

To the conventional argument that the achievements of Islamic
civilization in the medieval period shows the greatness of Islam,
Ibn Warraq revives the Victorian argument that Islamic civilization
came into existence not because of the Qur'an and Islamic law but
despite it. The stimulus in science and the arts came from outside
the Muslim world; where Islam reigned, these accomplishments took
place only where the dead hand of Islamic authority could be
avoided. Crediting Islam for the medieval cultural glories, he
believes, would be like crediting the Inquisition for Galileo's
discoveries.

Turning to the present, Ibn Warraq argues that Muslims have
experienced great travails trying to modernize because Islam stands
fore-square in their way. Its regressive orientation makes change
difficult: "All innovations are discouraged in Islam-every problem
is seen as a religious problem rather than a social or economic
one." This religion would seem to have nothing functional to offer.
"Islam, in particular political Islam, has totally failed to cope
with the modern world and all its attendant problems-social,
economic, and philosophical." Nor does the author hold out hope for
improvement. Take the matter of protecting individuals from the
state: "The major obstacle in Islam to any move toward international
human rights is God, or to put it more precisely . . . the reverence
for the sources, the Koran and the Sunna."

In a chapter of particular delicacy, given that he himself is a
Muslim living in the West, Ibn Warraq discusses Muslim emigration to
Europe and North America. He worries about the importation of
Islamic ways and advises the British not to make concessions to
immigrant demands but to stick firmly by their traditional
principles. "Unless great vigilance is exercised, we are all likely
to find British society greatly impoverished morally" by Muslim
influence. At the same time, as befits a liberal and
Western-oriented Muslim, Ibn Warraq argues that the key dividing
line is one of personal philosophy based and not (as Samuel
Huntington would have it) religious adherence. "[T]he final battle
will not necessarily be between Islam and the West, but between
those who value freedom and those who do not." This argument in fact
offers hope, implying as it does that peoples of divergent faiths
can find common ground.

As a whole, Ibn Warraq's assessment of Islam is exceptionally
severe: the religion is based on deception; it succeeded through
aggression and intimidation; it holds back progress; and it is a
"form of totalitarianism." Surveying nearly fourteen centuries of
history, he concludes, "the effects of the teachings of the Koran
have been a disaster for human reason and social, intellectual, and
moral progress."

As if this were not enough, Ibn Warraq tops off his blasphemy with
an assault on what he calls "monotheistic arrogance" and even
religion as such. He asks some interesting questions, the sort that
we in the West seem not to ask each other any more. "If there is a
natural evolution from polytheism to monotheism, then is there not a
natural development from monotheism to atheism?" Instead of God
appearing in obscure places and murky circumstances, "Why can He not
reveal Himself to the masses in a football stadium during the final
of the World Cup"? In 1917, rather than a miracle in Fatima,
Portugal, why did He not end the carnage on the Western Front?

This discussion points out just how much these issues are no longer
discussed in mainstream American intellectual life. Believers and
atheists go their separate ways, vilifying the other without
engaging in debate. For this reason, many of Ibn Warraq's
anti-religious statements have a surprisingly fresh quality.

It is hard for a non-Muslim fully to appreciate the offense Ibn
Warraq has committed, for his book of deep protest and astonishing
provocation goes beyond anything imaginable in our rough-and-tumble
culture. We have no pieties remotely comparable to Islam's. In the
religious realm, for example, Joseph Heller turned several Biblical
stories into pornographic fare in his 1984 novel God Knows, and no
one even noticed. For his portrayal of Jesus' sexual longings in the
1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese faced a few
pickets but certainly no threats to his life. Rushdie himself has
recently raised hackles in India by making fun of Bal Thackeray, a
fundamentalist Hindu leader-yet no threats have come from that
quarter. In the political arena, Charles Murray and Dinesh D'Souza
published books on the very most delicate American topic, the issue
of differing racial abilities, and neither had to go into hiding as
a result.

In contrast, blasphemy against Islam leads to murder-and not just to
Salman Rushdie or in places like Egypt and Bangladesh. At least one
such execution has taken place on American soil. Rashad Khalifa, an
Egyptian biochemist living in Tucson, Arizona, analyzed the Qur'an
by computer and concluded from some rather complex numerology that
the final two verses of the ninth chapter do not belong in the holy
book. This insight eventually prompted him to declare himself a
prophet, a very serious offense in Islam (which holds Muhammad to be
the last of the prophets). Some months later, on 31 January 1990,
unknown assailants-presumably orthodox Muslims angered by his
teachings-stabbed Khalifa to death. While the case remains unsolved,
it sent a clear and chilling message: even in the United States,
deviancy leads to death.

Writers deemed unfriendly to Islam are murdered all the time. Dozens
of journalists have lost their lives in Algeria as well as prominent
writers in Egypt and Turkey. Taslima Nasrin had to flee her native
Bangladesh for this reason. A terrible silence has descended on the
Muslim world, so that a book of this sort can only be published in
the West.

In this context, Ibn Warraq's claim of the right to disagree with
Islamic tenets is a shock. And all the more so when he claims even
the Westerner's right to do so disrespectfully! "This book is first
and foremost an assertion of my right to criticize everything and
anything in Islam-even to blaspheme, to make errors, to satirize,
and mock." Why I Am Not a Muslim does have a mocking quality, to be
sure, but it is also a serious and thought-provoking book. It calls
not for a wall of silence, much less a Rushdie-like fatwa on the
author's life, but for an equally compelling response from a
believing Muslim.

Ibn Warraq is the author of Why I Am Not a Muslim and the editor of The Origins of the Koran, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, and What the Koran Really Says.